Cafer Tar
“Erdoğan’s regime will do anything to stay in power. (…) So, what could be a possible excuse for Erdoğan to postpone or even cancel the elections? Only one answer: War! This is exactly what Erdoğan wants to do; to play the peoples of the region against each other so that he and his close companions will stay in power,” writes Cafer Tar for Yeni Özgür Politika.
April Catherine Glaspie was the first woman to be appointed as an American ambassador to an Arab country. Saddam Hussein formally came to power in Baghdad. After some years, he invaded Kuwait in 1990. Glaspie, US ambassador to Iraq, reportedly interested in Arab culture and literature, has written about key issues on this subject since her first term began.
Her approach enabled her to get closer to the Iraqi government of the time. During that period, closer relations between the United States and Iraq were established in every field.
Since 1990, following a meeting with Saddam Hussein as a US Ambassador, she has been the subject of much controversy as she had reportedly first informed Saddam Hussein that the Iraqi government had deployed a significant amount of troops along the Kuwait border. She reportedly told him, ”I want to ask you as a friend, regarding your intentions about Kuwait. We have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, so the Kuwait issue is none of America’s business!”
We all know what happened after that. But why did Saddam Hussein come up with such a silly decision to invade?
Ten years of war and dispute with Iran had brought the Iraqi economy to the point of collapse. Wasting money on arms, the state’s treasury was emptied and his government could not even pay its debts. Saddam Hussein wanted to get out of this economic difficulty by taking over Kuwait’s rich oil resources.
We all know what happened to Saddam and Iraq. Now, we see a very similar situation of aggression in Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. In Turkey, people are struggling with economic collapse, high rates of unemployment and the increasing gap between low wages and expensive prices.
According to the polling figures, Erdoğan has lost a great deal of public support. Erdoğan tried to knock out the HDP [the Peoples’ Democratic Party] in an attempt to stay in power, but this move was frustrated by the Kurdish movement and the supporters of the HDP.
At this stage, since the regime has not yet fully reached a level of pure authoritarianism, a change with the elections is still possible – that was something Erdoğan had experienced in the last municipal elections [in which Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party, the AKP, suffered a serious blow in major urban areas, losing Istanbul and the capital Ankara].
The question is: ‘If the People’s Alliance (the electoral alliance of the ruling coalition of the AKP and the Nationalist Movement Party, the MHP) loses its parliamentary majority in the next election, will it admit defeat?’ This question has no clear answer right now because Turkey does not have a predictable institutionalised political structure.
In my opinion, Erdoğan’s regime will do anything to stay in power: he will try to manipulate the elections, and if he doesn’t succeed in doing so, he will try to postpone the elections or even cancel the elections.
So, what could be a possible excuse for Erdoğan to postpone or even cancel the elections? Only one answer: “War!”
This is exactly what Erdoğan wants to do – to play the peoples of the region against each other so that he and his closes companions will stay in power.
A low-density war means, for Erdoğan, detaining people en masse, complete control of social media, pressure on the opposition, and more importantly, the possibility of postponing elections until he can be guaranteed victory.
Erdoğan went to Sochi to get approval from Putin. At the end of this month, he is planning to meet with US President Biden to get approval to attack Rojava. However, it is not so easy. Saddam also thought that it was easy after the invasion of Kuwait, but the whole country turned into a scene of fire.
We do not know what Erdoğan is talking about behind closed doors. Saddam thought he had the approval of the US Ambassador Glaspie and invaded Kuwait. Erdoğan is ‘playing with fire.’ We do not know who – including Russian leader Putin – has given what kind of promises to Erdoğan; but we will all see in practice how Erdoğan and his close circle will stand to lose everything in their pursuit of pushing for more, in the case of a possible attack on Rojava.
